My mother is an expert in planting and harvesting rice, growing and sorting coconuts, tending to children and chickens, and feeding goats and pigs. She learned a thing or two about hard work growing up on a farm in the tropics.
Not long after migrating to Australia, my parents latched onto the great Aussie dream of owning their own home. After spending several years renting a flat in Bondi, they took the plunge and bought a 3-bedroom family home out in the western suburbs of NSW.
Their dream came at a cost.
Not only would my dad work to pay the mortgage on the house, but my mother would have to as well.
Her entire day would be spent on a factory floor, shoulder to shoulder with migrants like herself, on a production line making the circuit boards for telephones. It was monotonous work for a pittance, but she was grateful for the opportunity.
She’d leave the house well before sun up, while the rest of the family were still fast asleep. Gently she’d shut the door behind her, to march along Marayong’s silent streets to the local train station.
It was always worse in the winter months.
Like a serpent, heavy fog twists around lampposts, creeping silently over houses and cars parked along the road. Shoes, jacket and gloves no match for the relentless chill that penetrates through to bone.
She’s a solitary figure in the darkness, enduring the cold and the niggling fear that a criminal might be lurking just behind the bushes.
I picture her taking a seat on an old red rattler, hugging her handbag, sitting all by herself.
I see her breath making small puffs of cloud in the carriage.
The train ride takes the better part of an hour.
Drawing closer to Redfern station, in dawning light, she makes out the graffiti on the walls of the buildings, bridges and tunnels. It’s quite an education. She reads unfamiliar sayings and swear words that never appeared in the English textbooks she read in her motherland.
Amidst the muck, against a red brick backdrop are big bold words in stark white paint. “JESUS SAVES”.
A simple two-word sermon that someone painted on a wall to declare truth.
Every weekday morning the same words call her attention. “JESUS SAVES”. Jesus saves what? Of course, it was a decade later, after she’d trusted Christ as her saviour, that she fully understood their meaning.
Jesus saves us from the consequences of sin—from eternal damnation in hell.
Jesus saves us so that we can enjoy him forever.
Jesus saves us so that we may serve, connect and create.
I wonder if she’ll ever meet up with that graffiti artist in heaven one day. It would be a joyous reunion with warm embraces and my mum chuckling over how those two elegant words were instrumental in her journey of faith.
One dear old woman from my church loves to cross-stitch. Her specialty is embellishing scripture verses with needlepoint. Even with failing eyesight and hands gnarled from arthritis, she manages to produce these beautiful cross-stitched designs.
I have watched her at work, mesmerized by the simple mechanics of it.
Push a needle with thread through the cloth, make an x shape, move along the cloth, make another cross, count the number of stitches and follow the design.
On more than one occasion, she has tried to impart her skills to me. (Sadly, I lack the patience for the craft and have only produced two—very ordinary—cross-stitched works.
As a youngster, she distinctly remembers cross-stitched bible verses hanging on walls. Words that have remained fixed in her heart.
So, she continues to sow God’s words in others by sewing them on cloth. She wants people to be reminded about God.
Hanging in the foyer of my house are two of her works. One is a large cross-stitched scripture verse “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved and thy house.” Acts 16:31
It’s loud, colorful and stitched in thick yarn. I love it not only for that particular scripture verse, but also for its rustic vibe. She made it in Argentina, at a time in her life when money was scarce, on cloth cut out from the side of a discarded hessian sack.
The other work is smaller—a delicate design on fine Aida cloth. It says, “Gods bless our home”.
We all need reminders.
In the book of Numbers, the Lord commanded the children to Israel to sew blue tassels upon the hems of their garments.
This would serve as a reminder to walk not after their own evil inclinations, but to follow the Lord.
The tassels of blue cord would be a perpetual reminder of God’s holiness and his commandments.
Numbers 15:39,40
And it shall be unto you for a fringe, that ye may look upon it, and remember all the commandments of the LORD, and do them; and that ye seek not after your own heart and your own eyes, after which ye use to go a whoring:
That ye may remember, and do all my commandments, and be holy unto your God.
Our Christian faith requires that we submit every aspect of our lives to divine direction.
What are you doing to remind yourself and others about God, his holiness and his word?
